Amy Ray and Emily Saliers founded the the Grammy Award-winning band the Indigo Girls. The first few seconds of Ray's latest CD, Didn't It Feel Kinder, are taken up by her voice alone. Throughout the album, Ray's voice is direct, unsentimental and free of irony.

This record sounds more like the Indigo Girls than Ray's first three solo recordings, which were more punk. The best song on the new CD is "Cold Shoulder," a celebratory rocker: "See that girl over there, she's gonna give me the cold shoulder/ she may be straight tonight, but last night she let me hold her."

Charlie King will perform a benefit concert for the Valley Post on October 2 in Hadley, Massachusetts, near Northampton. Pete Seeger said, "Charlie King is one of the finest singers and songwriters of our time."

The Sierra Leone Refugee All Stars band will play its soulful, dance-able reggae and Afro-pop music at the Iron Horse in Northampton on September 14 at 7 p.m. The members of the band lived in Sierra Leone until they fled the civil war there in the late 1990s. The uplifting story of their meeting in a refugee camp in Guinea is told in a documentary film that's named after the band. The DVD is available at your local public library, video store, or from Netflix. The band's new CD was released by the Vermont record label www.cumbancha.com Tickets to the concert are available from www.iheg.com

Natalie Merchant, probably the world’s best female singer, will sing in Northampton on July 13. It will be her first concert in the Valley in at least a decade. Her lyrics, and the music on her albums, are often – but not always – excellent. But Merchant’s concerts are always great, thanks to her incomparable voice.

In the song “Motherland," Merchant sings:

Where in hell can you go
Far from the things that you know
Far from the sprawl of concrete
That keeps crawling its way
About 1,000 miles a day?

Jess Harlen, a new singer from Australia with a stunning voice, has performed in Europe and Japan. Her next stop could be Northampton.

“I’d love to play there,” Harlen told the Valley Post recently. Her most popular single on YouTube, “Watch the Water,” was inspired while she was swimming in the warm ocean waters of Mexico – not too far from the U.S., she noted. A brilliant video of her performing that song is at:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvBAXq2Vdhw

Harlen writes all her own lyrics and music.

Singer Philip Hamilton will perform a public concert in Keene on April 13 at 7:30 p.m. Hamilton teaches at Columbia University. Born in West Medford, Massachusetts, Hamilton graduated from Middlebury College and Berklee College of Music. In Keene, he will sing with his nine-person a cappella group. They will sing Gregorian chants, the blues, and miners' songs. They have performed at Lincoln Center in New York City. The concert will be at Keene State College, in the Redfern building at 229 Main Street in downtown Keene. Tickets cost between $12 and $23.

More information is at:

There was a brown door in a modest kitchen, scuffed by the onslaught of time, children and life's general maneuvers. It guarded a staircase leading down to a basement, spacious enough and made congenial, such that it was often strewn about with middle-aged men.

When closed, this door allowed a generous amount of space between it and the floor, and was not the most efficient muffler of sound. If one crouched by its bottom, the world it attempted to conceal came spilling forth like the secrets of some giddy deluge.

Benny Johnson approached about 20 people who were dancing to rap music at a house party late on a recent Thursday night on Lincoln Street in Amherst. Once people recognized him, the music was turned off and the requests poured in.

“Motown Man! Play a song!”

Benny quickly obliged, performing “Twist and Shout” with a bucket, a kazoo hanging from his neck and a worn shaker held together by masking tape.

The crowd’s dancing soon engulfed him as the whole room sang along to the classic Beatles song. After two encores Benny left with a Keystone Light as a parting gift.

Los Lobos has won three Grammy awards. Rolling Stone magazine said, “With the exception of U2, no band has stayed on top of its game as long as Los Lobos.” On Sept. 17 at 8 p.m., Los Lobos will play at the Calvin Theater in Northampton.

Tickets start at $25. Tickets for $75 include a “meet and greet” with the band and benefit the Latino Scholarship Fund.

Los Lobos (spanish for "the wolves") has five members, all of whom are Latino. The band is based in Los Angeles, California, where it was formed in 1973.

Musician and peace activist Michael Franti of San Francisco www.spearheadvibrations.com will play with his band at the Green River Festival www.greenriverfestival.com on July 18 at Greenfield Community College.

Franti performed live in the studio at Brattleboro Community Radio as a benefit for the station. www.wvew.org

Here are some of the lyrics to Franti’s song, “Bomb the World to Pieces.”

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We can chase down all our enemies,
bring them to their knees.

We can bomb the world to pieces
but we can’t bomb it into peace

Violence brings one thing: